Kersti Jan Werdal
Directing
Biography
Kersti Jan Werdal is a photographer and filmmaker based between California and Washington state.
Known For

In I Cannot Now Recall, a collection of Yvonne Rainer's dreams are presented, selected by the filmmaker from Rainer's journals. Through choice and abstraction, the film produces a shared psychic landscape that is as expansive as it is anxious.
I Cannot Now Recall

Kersti Jan Werdal’s Test Piece critically examines the art of filmmaking as a synthesis of conceptual construction and intricate editing. Inspired by Straub-Huillet, the film deconstructs the fundamental elements of film, image, sound, and text, to create a space for reflection and thought rather than conventional narrative explanation or emotional immersion.
Test Piece

A coming-of-age film about a group of outsider teenagers in Seattle dealing with the consequences of accidental gun violence in their hometown.
Lake Forest Park

Asli Baykal’s Darkroom, created with the young participants of the Sirkhane Darkroom Workshop in a border town between Turkey and Syria, opens the screening program. In it, children roam the area, looking at the world through the viewfinders of analog cameras, in an intimate vision of the medium as a form of play and a way to forge an alternate reality in a conflict zone.
Darkroom

Film installation intended to play on loop, S16mm.
Fansy Place
Working with red clay excavated from the cemetery grounds of New Hope Baptist Church, the artist binds place, kinship and mortality into a single material gesture. The site was once his grandfather's land, later gifted to the church, and now holds multiple generations of his family.
Harlem, Georgia, 18 Miles from Augusta
Short film addressing urban alienation in contrast to Brittany Bailey's slow-moving body, Shot in New-York.
slow shaper

Promenade is an observational doc portrait of dancer-choreographer Brittany Bailey as she prepares to debut a new work, while interrogating performance representation in moving image.
Promenade
Film essay about blue. Sound and image weave into a diaristic narrativ sketch reflecting a stream of consciousness,